How the Left Shrank

I was born in 1967.  When I was a baby, there was an intensely musical antiwar movement so big and so very attractive, that it swept much of society off its feet, demilitarized millions of hearts and minds, and played a serious role in curtailing the imperial interests of the world's biggest empire, for about twenty years afterwards (it was called "Vietnam Syndrome").

When I was a baby, there was a huge and militant Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and they all were against the war, too, and made that very clear in all kinds of ways, including by participating in those huge antiwar marches.  There was the American Indian Movement, Raza Unida, the student movement, the feminist movement, and it was all self-consciously interconnected into a thing that millions of people daily and habitually referred to as "The Movement."

In 1971 some very heroic folks broke into the FBI offices in Media, Pennsylvania while everyone inside was busy watching an epic fight (Joe Frazier vs. Muhammad Ali).  They stole over a thousand classified documents that revealed some of the practices of the FBI's Counterintelligence Program.

Locally police departments had what were commonly known as Red Squads.  What the FBI dubbed Cointelpro for short was a national-level Red Squad.  The liberated documents revealed a stunning array of really underhanded methods the FBI used to systematically keep the left as disoriented, distracted, and divided as possible.

There's your background.  Apologies to those who already know all that history, but I increasingly meet people who have absolutely no idea any of this stuff ever happened, and it's very necessary history for understanding everything that's happened since then that I'll be mentioning. 

Growing up in the 1980's me and my friends tended to think the left was really small and insignificant in the US, which it certainly was compared to twenty years earlier.  But there were independent book stores, infoshops, indy record labels, cooperatives of various sorts, in cities across the US.  Like other young people in the 80's hanging out at places like that, me and my punk friends all learned about Cointelpro, learned about how cool the Black Panthers and AIM and SDS had been, discovered Utah Phillips and the history of the IWW, and read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

In the 90's I was at least peripherally involved with what we called the radical environmental movement at the time.  Then at the end of the 90's, in a much more intense way, with the much larger and more pervasive global justice movement.  And then the massive, global antiwar movement that rose up immediately following September 11th, 2001.  And I've involved myself in many other movements that have sprung up since then.

With the movement that back in the 60's they called The Movement, intersectionality was fundamentally important. With the global justice movement in the 90's it was the same.  In Europe they were calling it the red-green alliance.  In the US context, where red is blue, it was "Teamsters and turtles."

Since the days of the global justice movement, and especially since the rise of the antiwar movement after 9/11, I have watched as what we might historically have called the left -- that is, the various elements of society who stand for the welfare of the working class, the health of the environment, the rights of women, those seeking to end militarism and imperialism, etc. -- tear itself apart, one chunk of flesh at a time.

Cointelpro has continued since long after the raid on the FBI offices -- of that there is no serious doubt.  And at the same time, we don't necessarily need the FBI's help to arrive at such a divided and conquered state.  Social media algorithms alone could do that for us pretty well, I suspect.  And we probably don't even need either the FBI or the algorithms, with all the other good reasons we have to disagree with each other.

For almost two decades I toured most of the time, mostly in the US, so I got to see the country as it evolved over time, a snapshot every few months of many different parts of the world.  In the past decade or so, much less touring in the US, and far fewer snapshots.  So when I get them, they can be much more of a shock.

It becomes much clearer, when you get the snapshot less often, how fast the left is disintegrating itself, excluding one group after another.  People who would have been organizing, or at least coming to, my shows in a given city now don't, because they don't agree with something they now think I stand for, or because they suspect there will be other people in the room they don't want to see -- former comrades who now think they are fascists, or abusers, or transphobes, or racists, antisemites, or all kinds of other things.

In the 90's I saw the left essentially drive out a Christian group called the Bruderhof.  The Bruderhof have long been very supportive of political prisoners such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, and sought to build alliances for a while, but they were rebuffed, in many different ways, by leftists who couldn't stomach working with people they perceived as sexist and homophobic.

After September 11th, 2001, there were many people who participated in antiwar movement activities whose general focus was on getting to the bottom of what really happened -- what was the involvement of Saudi Arabia, of Israel, of the CIA, in cultivating Al-Qaeda in the first place?  Were there people inside US intelligence agencies who knew something was about to happen?

This element of the antiwar movement was increasingly over time isolated from the rest of the movement.  Conspiracy theories seemed to get wilder over time.  There are all kinds of explanations for this phenomenon, which can operate simultaneously.  But whatever was determining the development of this phenomenon, that's what happened, and now if I ever see or hear about folks who were in that camp of the antiwar movement, it's because I'm watching them on Fox.

It was once the case, at least by my possibly rose-tinted recollections, that the left tended to be a big enough tent that it included a spectrum of views on free speech as a concept, from free speech "absolutists" to those who engaged in actions like shutting down events and got accused in the press as people who were opposed to free speech, for what they themselves considered to be an opposition to hate speech, or dangerously far right views.

I have watched as the free speech absolutists have been alienated from the left, and many of those that would once have been considered part of the fabric of the progressive scene now consider themselves to be on the right, or at least libertarian, or, as they often call themselves, "politically homeless."

I watched as those who didn't subscribe to tactics like burning dumpsters or throwing projectiles got denounced as opponents of "diversity of tactics," and I watched as demonstrations shrank precipitously with each new dumpster burnt.

I heard with horror of the end of the Michigan Women's Festival in 2015.  I was at the last London Anarchist Book Fair in 2017, and saw how the organizers were attacked as transphobes for daring to think that the book fair could still be a forum that included different perspectives on many issues, all in one large building, including women who would once have just been called feminists, but we are now told they are TERFs.

I witnessed one person after another get accused and broadly shunned allegedly for being abusers, or sympathetic to one, for questioning the story of someone claiming to be a victim, for not always, unquestioningly "believing her" in every case.

I watched elements of the environmental movement sabotage itself by spreading the notion within its ranks that white people wearing dreadlocks is cultural appropriation, and therefore racist.  An environmental movement where around a third of the participants were white people with dreadlocks was suddenly anti-dreadlock.

I saw people get kicked out of venues because their professed belief in Nordic mythology was judged to be too sympathetic to Adolf Hitler.  This is a widespread thing in Germany, where they excel at this sort of splitting, too.

I watched one after another Marxist or anarchist intellectual join the list of the shunned and denounced, for their attachment to the notion that we exist in the context of a capitalist system.  I was personally kicked out of the Anarchist subreddit for being a "class reductionist."  Those of us involved with Occupy Wall Street in 2011 were told we weren't paying enough attention to things like race and gender, with our obsession with the rich owning everything.

In 2020 I saw as one after another natural living yoga practitioner sort started drifting from a soft left kind of orbit to a more and more conspiratorial orientation, as they were increasingly shunned by those telling them if they were hesitant about the emergency vaccines, they were causing harm, being selfish, and probably supported Trump.

I watched one new group after another attempt to join the movement that was on the streets in 2020, and heard the accusations made about each of them, about how they fell short of what was expected of good allies these days, for insufficiently centering the right people, generally.

By my recollection, the left once included people who believed in voting for the Democrats, those who rejected the whole charade of elections in this corrupt system, and those that campaigned for third party candidates.  Today if you support the Green Party you will be denounced as a stooge of Putin by some fairly prominent people long known as anarchists and socialists.

Opponents of NATO expansionism and all the billions in military aid sent to Ukraine are also denounced as Putin stooges.

As the antiwar movement shrank to nearly nothing, and people coming out of different political traditions tried to organize together, I saw how they were denounced right away, loudly and often, as some kind of closet fascist movement trying to build a mythical "red-brown alliance" in 2022.

In some places, especially Germany, we can see Arabs and Muslims in recent months being driven out of anti-racist rallies against the far right, on the basis that they are presumed to be antisemites, if they're critical of Israel.

In England I have watched the British Labor Party eviscerate itself of all its best people, denouncing them as antisemites, an ongoing process.

And of course throughout all of this I have seen music and culture become more and more isolated from an ever-more cerebral and online left, arriving now at a juncture where across the USA you are extremely unlikely to hear live music at a protest, since now anyone with an acoustic guitar on the left seems to be associated with the perception of a failed antiwar movement that people have heard about existing, a long time ago, on TV.

You can still hear live music at political events, however.  Just go to any Trump rally.